Content providers have long struggled with how to provide media to their customers at a high availability and high performance in view of bandwidth limitations in content distribution networks. A Content Distribution Network (CDN) can be a large distributed system of servers deployed in multiple data centers connected to the Internet or other public/private communication network. One function of a CDN is to serve media content (e.g., video/audio/etc.) to user equipment nodes (UEs). Example UEs that can receive media content are televisions, digital media recorders, desktop computers, and mobile terminals (e.g., smart phones and tablet computers).
The bandwidth requirements for distributing content from content providers to central CDN servers and/or to distributed CDN replication servers have grown tremendously with the proliferation of adaptive streaming content delivery solutions. Adaptive streaming technology is being implemented to handle increasing consumer demands for streaming content from Over The Top (OTT) applications on OTT content servers (e.g., broadcast and on-demand movies/TV/etc.) across a CDN to UEs having widely differing performance and protocols. Example adaptive streaming protocols includes Apple initiated HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) protocol, Microsoft initiated Smooth Streaming over HTTP protocol, Adobe initiated Dynamic Streaming protocol, and MPEG Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (MPEG DASH) protocol.
HTTP Adaptive Streaming Servers (HASS) can function to convert a source media content stream into a plurality of content streams having different coding bit rates. A group of multiple bit rate content streams may be transcoded to provide a plurality of groups of multiple bit rate content streams having different distribution container formats that can be required by different streaming protocols used by UEs (e.g., HLS protocol, Smooth Streaming protocol, Dynamic Streaming protocol, MPEG DASH protocol, etc.). Accordingly, a single group of multiple bit rate content streams can result in numerous groups of differently formatted multiple bit rate content streams that need to be distributed and stored at a central CDN server and/or distributed to CDN replication servers. Distributing media content in this manner consumes tremendous CDN resources. Moreover, some types of media, such as video, can consume particularly high bandwidth for each stream.
The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.